Savage Spring (42 page)

They sink down onto the dirty stone floor. Illuminate the cave-like space with the light of their mobile phones. Look at the drawings, presumably made by Josefina Marlöw herself with some of the chalk on the floor. Stick figures, like letters in a foreign alphabet. They look like children playing.

Malin and Zeke are sleepy, it’s almost midnight and they want to sleep, but can’t yet, mustn’t sleep here. Yet still, in spite of the hardness of the floor and the strange, damp climate, they both doze off.

Malin and Zeke sleep, and they both dream about a closed room, like the one they’re in now, and in the room are two frightened little children crying for help, but there’s no sound, just the children’s lips moving.

‘Here we are!’ the children cry. ‘Here we are!’ and Malin can hear the voices now, and feels someone shaking her by the arm, someone saying: ‘So here you are. How did you find your way?’

Malin opens her eyes. Zeke does the same, and they find themselves looking at Josefina Marlöw.

She’s crouching in front of them, and the look in her eyes seems to cut straight through the weak light of a flickering candle, and they can see that she’s clear and focused in the aftermath of her hit. Malin stares at her, tries to focus her gaze with groggy eyes, before saying: ‘Your girls, we’re trying to find out what happened to them, who killed them. You’re the only person who can help us.’

Josefina Marlöw sits down on a piece of cardboard, looks at them. Beside her are a spoon and a syringe, several blood-stained scraps of cloth, and the whole of her lower arms are covered with track marks.

‘I know,’ she says, ‘that Father, Josef, has written a will giving me control of everything. He got some heavies to come and pick me up and take me to Strandvägen a few months back, I think it was. He’s going to die soon, I know that. Maybe I’ve been back there since. I’m not sure.’

No shakes now.

No stammering.

More an assured flow of words from a well-brought-up girl.

No grief in her voice or eyes.

But possibly relief. The same relief that Dad seemed to feel at Mum’s funeral, Malin thinks. The same relief I felt.

‘He told me he’d disinherited my brothers, Henry and Leopold. That I’d be given control of a foundation in Switzerland in which he’d placed all his assets. He lay there in bed smiling when he told me. What was I supposed to do? Say I wasn’t interested? He knew that. Maybe he just wanted to upset my brothers. I’m not interested in his games.’

‘You don’t remember anything else from your meeting with him?’ Zeke asks.

‘He said that if I died before him he might leave everything to the State Inheritance Fund instead. Or appoint some sort of independent management. Money for money’s sake.’

‘Why do you think he’s made you his main beneficiary?’ Malin asks as she feels an icy chill spread through her stomach.

An inheritance, billions managed by a foundation, or lost to the Inheritance Fund. Two disinherited brothers. This could be the motive for the bombing, for the girls’ deaths.

Josefina Marlöw is silent for a while, then says: ‘He wanted to give me the poison. His poison, instead of my own. He hates the fact that I turned my back on him and live a life of my own choosing. However fucked up that life might be. He wants me to become like him. But at the same time he loves the fact that I am who I am, and don’t hold back. The way I inhabit my life so perfectly.’

‘Why do you think he doesn’t want to give your brothers any money?’

‘They didn’t turn out the way he wanted.’

‘The way he wanted?’

‘Yes. He used to experiment on them when they were little. Wanted to turn them into the perfect, greedy, ruthless businessmen.’

‘What did he do to them?’

‘He tried to get them to feel special, chosen, gave them power over various pets he bought, guinea pigs, rabbits, a golden retriever puppy, and he taught them that animals can be tamed through beatings. He gave them large sums of money to spend even when they were children, let them experience what it was like to have power over assistants, and traders, to have people fawning over them, so that they’d end up obsessed with the possibilities that money offers, the power. We had servants at home, and he put my brothers in charge of them, but they were also allowed to punish the boys. He never comforted them, he would hit them and yell at them, punishing them whenever anything went wrong, all to encourage them to be ruthless.

‘He had a lizard. Sometimes he used to tease it, then set it on my brothers. To scare them, put them in their place.’

The stuffed beast in Josef Kurtzon’s sickroom.

Josefina Marlöw falls silent and closes her eyes, then goes on: ‘And he’d get them to beat me,’ she says. ‘He had them beat me in the cellar, and if they didn’t, because they didn’t want to, he’d give them electric shocks. So they beat me. Gave me electric shocks. He wanted to make them understand the meaning of consequences, of brutality.’

Malin feels the contours of the little room wavering before her eyes.

Nausea rising from her gut.

Then she forces herself to focus.

So Josef Kurtzon tried to turn his sons into psychopaths? Some sort of warped characters, perfect for business: was that what you tried to shape your children into, Josef Kurtzon? And Malin feels a sudden urge to go back to the apartment on Strandvägen and crush the old man’s blind, cataract-damaged eyes into his skull. And the Kurtzon brothers, what would they be capable of as adults? Murder? A bomb in a city square?

‘Father always despised them,’ Josefina Marlöw says, opening her eyes again.

‘Why?’

‘Because the strength and business success he hoped to instil in them ended up as weakness and failure. He sometimes supported their business ventures, but in the end I think he only did it to play with them, to mock them with their failures. But at the same time he despised them for wanting to see themselves reflected in wealth.’

‘Reflected in wealth?’

‘They enjoyed showing how rich they were. But Father thought that money itself was what mattered. Buying status and boasting about your wealth disgusts him. A truly great man is above that.’

‘So they like showing off their wealth?’

‘Yes. Just like Mum. For Mum the most important thing was showing off a perfect, extravagant façade.’

Josefina Marlöw falls silent.

‘That was what Mum tried to teach them,’ she goes on after a pause. ‘That a person’s true worth is measured by how much money they have. And to do that, you have to show off your wealth, because what else is it good for? Mum was crazy about money. We had a toilet with a gold seat at home.’

‘She and your father seem to have been very different?’

‘Yes. But there were similarities. Money meant everything, love nothing.’

‘Tell us more about your brothers,’ Malin says.

‘What else is there to say? Henry’s the oldest, two years older than me, and there’s a year between him and Leopold. Leopold’s the dominant one, even though he’s younger. Henry mostly follows his lead. At least that’s how it’s always looked to me. But in Father and Mum’s eyes they’re united by weakness.’

‘They must have been confused by the conflicting attitudes of your parents?’ Malin asks. ‘That she wanted to show off her wealth, and he loathed that sort of behaviour?’

‘No matter who talked to them as children, the result was always the same: money. Money, and still more money. Take away their money, and the promise of inheriting money, and you take their lives away from them.’

Malin feels the icy chill in her stomach growing as she hears Josefina Marlöw say those words.

‘Where are your brothers now?’ Zeke asks.

‘They’ve both got flats on Strandvägen. I was given one as well, but that went in here a long time ago.’

Josefina Marlöw points at the track marks on her arm.

‘They’re not at Strandvägen,’ Malin says. ‘And we haven’t managed to find any other addresses. Do you have any idea where they could be? Does either of them have a house anywhere else? A summer house? Something abroad?’

‘I’ve got no idea,’ Josefina Marlöw says, the light in her eyes gradually fading. ‘It’s a long time since I cared.’

She looks as if she wants to vanish from the face of the earth, but if that were really the case, why not jump in front of an underground train, or off the Western Bridge, or just pump yourself full of heroin? Malin wonders.

Why drag it out like this?

She realises how impossible it is ever to understand someone like Josefina Marlöw, what drives her, why she’s ended up like this, what fears she carries within her.

‘But I have done one thing,’ Josefina Marlöw says. ‘If I get Father’s inheritance, then the girls will get everything when I die, which probably won’t be long now. Even if I hate money, the girls can have some use out of it. I’ve sorted it all out officially with a solicitor.’

She falls silent.

‘Would have got,’ she whispers. ‘Even if the money could have harmed them. It doesn’t matter what you do, it never ends up right, does it?’

‘Could your brothers have known about that?’ Zeke asks.

‘How would they have found out?’

‘Could your father have known about it?’ Malin asks, and now she can see Josefina Marlöw starting to drift away, and she looks down at her spoon, her syringe, the little bag of white powder in the far corner of the room.

‘No,’ Josefina Marlöw says. ‘Father didn’t know. I’m sure he didn’t know about the girls.’

Or so you reckon, Malin thinks.

‘So you don’t think your brothers could be behind the explosion in Linköping that killed your girls, as a way of somehow getting their hands on the inheritance?’

‘When people are put under pressure they’re capable of anything,’ Josefina Marlöw says. ‘Who knows what my brothers might get into their heads? What Father could come up with? What he said about the trust and the State Inheritance Fund could have been rubbish.’

Malin and Zeke look at each other. Surreptitiously, without nodding or saying anything, they exchange a glance of confirmation in an attempt to hold something frightening, unknown, at bay.

‘What’s the solicitor’s name?’ Malin asks after a pause.

‘Jörgen. Jörgen Stålsten. I was . . . at school . . . with him.’

‘Where can we find . . .?’

Josefina Marlöw is no longer listening, and is scrabbling feverishly for the bag of white powder.

Malin sees her thin fingers searching, and Josefina Marlöw grunts, letting out small pained noises, as if ravenous lizards have appeared inside her, snapping at her with scalpel-sharp teeth.

Malin turns to look at Zeke.

He nods.

And they leave the room, leaving Josefina Marlöw in the flickering light of the candle.

I’m going to work out how this fits together, Malin thinks. I have to.

47

Saturday, 15, Sunday, 16 May

What’s she getting close to?

The phone call from Malin hadn’t woken his family, thank goodness. Johan Jakobsson himself hadn’t been asleep, he’d been lying in bed reading an old copy of
Wired
, and managed to answer the call on the second ring. His wife had been asleep beside him, the deep sleep of an exhausted mother of small children, and the children had been snuffling noisily in their own rooms.

Malin had been brief when she asked him to dig out everything he could find about the brothers Leopold and Henry Kurtzon, if there was anything out there.

When he had sat down at the computer that was set up on a small oak desk in a cramped corner of the hall, Johan had realised how tired he was, how this case had almost poisoned him, how the fruitless search for connections and contexts, the digging into people’s lives and opinions, had almost made him lose his grip on what he himself felt, what he actually thought about anything.

Then, once he’d switched the computer on, all his negative thoughts had vanished. He had started his search on Google, typing in Leopold Kurtzon and getting two thousand, one hundred and fifty hits, most of them in articles about his father, Josef Kurtzon.

One result led to the
Wall Street Journal
, and he clicked the link but found himself on a page for paying subscribers only, thirty-five dollars for a month of access.

Two hundred kronor.

This’ll make Sven groan, Johan thought, as he went to get his credit card from his wallet in his jacket and paid up.

The article was from 1998, from the paper’s Sunday supplement, and was entitled ‘Inheritance of misfortune’. It was about heirs all around the world who had struggled, usually in vain, to find a place in their families’ businesses – usually their fathers’.

There were a few American examples, including Bernard Madoff’s sons. And Ingvar Kamprad’s boys. And then a long piece about someone depicted as a dark horse: Leopold Kurtzon, son of the mysterious financier, Josef Kurtzon.

The journalist had persuaded Leopold to agree to a lengthy interview, and the article was illustrated with a picture that looked as if it was taken on board a yacht. You couldn’t see where in the world the picture was taken, and it wasn’t made clear in the article either: the open sea in the background could have been anywhere.

Leopold Kurtzon’s father was said to have tried to raise his son to take over the role of financial leader after he and his brother Henry had attended ‘Sweden’s most prestigious private school’. After they left school, scholarships to Harvard Business School were arranged for them, but the brothers evidently had problems with their studies and preferred to spend their time partying like idiots. A fellow student talked about ‘the Swedish maniacs’, and after a year there Leopold and Henry Kurtzon were thrown out. At that point Leopold Kurtzon was said to have returned to Stockholm and taken up a ‘minor, junior position’ in one of the many companies in his father’s empire.

His brother was said to have done the same.

According to Leopold Kurtzon himself, his father had kept an eye on him but gradually lost interest in both him and his brother Henry when he decided they weren’t capable of reaching the very highest level of business.

‘I, or rather we, tried to prove to him that we were good enough. But it was impossible. He’d made up his mind.’